The word from Robot Towers is that those nice folks at amazon are doing a price promotion on Kindle for a range of Angry Robot Books; until August 31st, if you live in the UK and you have a Kindle, you can buy Winter Song for the ludicrously cheap price of 99p a copy.

And if you want more (why? <g>) there are fifteen other titles you can pick up as well. The full list is available at Angry Robot’s website.

It’s already been mentioned on their site that I’ll be attending Alt Fiction in Derby, but as it’s a 2-day event, I thought I’d better clarify; I’ll be there on Saturday 25th June only, rather than for both days…unless anything changes over the next month.

I’ve had my provisional timetable, which involves me in three panels — although panels isn’t quite the word. I’ll be participating in a podcast at noon; ‘Breaking into Writing is the subject, and I’ll be one of four writers involved.

From 5 to 6 I’ll be reading in the Participation Space (I have a vague memory that that’s the middle of a big open plan area…).

And earlier, from 3 to 4 I’ll be involved in running a workshop, which is going to be erm, interesting….I’m not sure how exactly this is going to work; there’s no set format, so I may end up with people bringing things they’ve already written. If that’s the case, I’m happy to read previously written pieces. Or I may end up just fielding questions.

So let’s have a straw poll; if you were going to a workshop for one hour, what would you prefer to do? Talk theory, or workshop written pieces? Is there a 3rd option, I haven’t thought of?

In case you’re unfamiliar with his name, Andy has done the artwork for my two of my three previous anthologies, so I freely admit to a tinge of nepotism. But more pertinently, he’s has been a finalist for the BSFA award in three of the last four years, and has won twice, for his cover for Ian Whates’ Subterfuge, and the year before for Cracked World for Whates’ previous anthology DisLocations. (sigh, I knew them both before they were famous…) So the BSFA think he’s good as well.

One of the things I love about Andy’s work is that with its spaceships and other SF tropes it’s reminiscent of the cover art from the early 1970s, by artists like Bruce Pennington and Eddie Jones; but while Andy’s work is tech-heavy, there are hints that he’s beginning to experiment, to play with other form.

As I said last time, I’ll be signing both books, as will lots of other authors, such as Gareth L Powell and Andy Remic; The Sixty includes all the aforementioned, plus my own Displacement, Sam Stones’ Killing Kiss, and many, many others. All illustrations are accompanied by short passages from the texts illustrated, and Andy may have an original short story or two in there from various authors.

Something significant happened at 12.27 today; at about the same time as I was submitting my first assignment, in Feature Journalism, the thermometer rose to freezing point. It’s the first time in I’m not sure how many days that it’s shown positive. It’s still bitterly cold, but at least now I can leave off tipping boiling water into the bird bath. (No, we’re not parboiling the local sparrows — within a few minutes it’s barely above freezing again, but at least it’s drinkable)

Kate took some pictures yesterday, which will illustrate our wintry world far better than I can.

And in the same way as there’s a sense that the world is thawing gradually, so I’ve finally started to feel as if I’m getting on top of things, for the first time in quite a while.

Partly that’s because I’m about two days away from finishing the revision of Ultramassive. I have one more pass to do a light edit of certain passages, but I’ve used the time freed up from working at the BEH to target this.

And, as I blogged yesterday, Film is done and dusted for a few days. It’s now onto the nice part, the concept stages leading to a screenplay. And tomorrow night our core lecture will take the form of a screening of the Swedish version of Let the Right One In. Must remember to pick up the popcorn on the way in…

One of the reasons why I’ve been realtively quiet lately is due to workload, as I’ve mentioned several times in posts elsewhere. This week particularly seems to be the week of the interview.

First of all, I’ve been interviewed in some depth by Irish magazine Albedo One in an e-mail interview (e-view?) which is on-going. Because of the magazine’s lead times, it’ll be some time before it sees the light of day.

However, an interview I gave Canadian fan Jessica Strider is now on-line. Jessica works for the World’s Greatest Bookstore, who have made me the Featured Author for December, and the interview has been typed up and posted in-store, but it’s now available on-line as well.

And sometime soon, I’ll be in the Angry Robot podcast for December. More on that nearer the time.

Before I head off to uni, a reminder that I’m in London tomorrow night for the BSFA interview at the Antelope near Sloane Square. I’ll probably kick the proceedings off by reading from Damage Time. Details are here, so feel free to come along and say hi.

Meanwhile, there’s another nice review for Damage Time over at Warpcore SF, which has several interesting points to make – not all of them I agree with, but that’s what set’s merely nice reviews apart from interesting ones.

And SFX carried a fascinating interesting review. Not for what it said, but for the assumptions behind it, which in turn sparked off some thoughts on my part about what kind of writer I want to be. More on that another time….

I can’t quite work out whether in recent years –perhaps because we’ve been involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, or perhaps because there are fewer and fewer left of those who served in the World Wars– we’ve made more of Rememberance Sunday, or whether I’ve just become more sensitive to it with the passing of time.

It always makes the weekend of my birthday oddly poignant, but I thought it’s important that we at least mark the sacrifice of the men and women who have sacrificed their lives for what they believe is right. Even a couple of minutes’ worth of silence is only one-thirtieth of an hour, less than one seven-hundredth of a day.

If you have a chance to listen to Eddie Butler’s eulogy to Sir Tasker Watkins, the former president of the Welsh Rugby Union, do so. It almost literally takes the breath away. I can’t imagine how terrifying the experiences in that Normandy cornfield must have been.

Well, that was good. Bristolcon 10 was over three times the size of last year, with an attendance of over 150 people. Now, that’s a proper con. The panels were well attended — I opened on the Juliet E. McKenna moderated Publishing panel with Mike Shevdon, Andy Bigwood and Dave Bradley of SFX, then sat in on the Joe Abercrombie interview, both of which were excellent. I followed that with an hour on the con dealer’s desk and then the Dark Spires launch.

That went pretty well, although it became a little chaotic (mea culpa) as the event progressed. There were definitely learning points to be taken from it. Like, put the box -and the designated treasurer- at the end of the line. Still, we had good sales, and people seemed to like the actual finish of the book, which is marvellous, IMHO.

After a late lunch and a visit to the Dealer’s Room to pick up Murky Depths 14, containing Neil Beynon’s ‘Stone,’ onto The Future of Science panel. Impressed as expected by Alastair Reynalds and Gareth L Powell, but it emerges that Paul Cornell’s urbane exterior camouflages an Inner Science Geek…

The Programme culminated with ‘Writing Fight Scenes,’ in which Joe Abercrombie was repeatedly thrown down by Juliet E. McKenna and Meaney-san. I was supposed to moderate this panel, which turned out to be an exercise in futility, but by this time a worsening chest infection (which has seen me confined to barracks while Kate and Sharon hit Bath) forced me into withdrawing from both my panel and the 6.50 reading. Cheryl Morgan was a more than adequate replacement.

Damage Timeis officially out in the wild today, although a few rogue copies cut the wire earlier this week and scrabbled out under the noses of the guards — Donna and Matt saw copies on their travels in Bath yesterday, whileCybermage has already posted a really nice review. The US will see copies creeping out from the 26th of this month.

And there was a nice piece of serendipity with the William Gibson talk that I attended down at the Watershed last night. Gibson spoke eloquently, if a little raggedly (I dread to think how many of these presentations he’s done) on a number of subjects, one of which is how much faster the world evolves now than -say- forty or fifty years ago. “The only novels from that period who even came close to predicting the exquisitely fucked-up complexity of 2010 are [John Brunner’s] Stand On Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up,” he said.

Those novels cover different topics; while Brunner’s works cover over-population and pollution, I’ve chosen as themes a lurching toward post-technology. But the similarity is in the narrative style; I’ll freely acknowledge that the sidebar chapters owe a lot to Brunner’s montages, especially in the magnificent Stand On Zanzibar.

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